How the New Surveillance Bill Would Change the Law

Yesterday, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), and many others in the House and Senate introduced the much-needed USA Freedom Act, legislation aimed at providing oversight of government surveillance programs and ending “dragnet” collection of phone data. While the bill authors helpfully made available the bill's text and a summary thereof, we wanted to see exactly how the legislation would change the law.

To that end, we compared the USA Freedom Act against the US Code, showing exactly how the 118-page bill would change the law. While our efforts are undoubtedly imperfect, we hope the resulting document will help everyone read and understand this important legislation. You can read the results below, download this PDF, or download this Word document.